6 Day Old Chick - Crop and Digestive Tract Problem - Foreign matter "Blockage"

[HoopyFrood]

Early in the morning today my 5 day old Australorp chick started acting lethargic. We immediately started investigating and observing and I started a previous thread on this forum:
https://www.backyardchickens.com/t/...hicks-possible-impacted-crop/10#post_18459780

There are red herrings in that post so don't worry about it in detail.

After a day of work I am reasonably confident in the diagnosis: she ate some foreign matter (I think it was a pine shaving, but possibly a piece of pine needle) that got lodged in her crop. She could not dislodge it, but it did not block the digestive track either.

Here were the symptoms:
- Lethargy
- Ability to eat, drink, and poop BUT!
- Lack of desire to eat, drink, and poop.
- Soft crop (not impacted or hard)
- Puffy chest (she was favoring that side and was puffing her chest out)
- Doing a torso "wiggle" side to side like a penguin
- Red, flushed skin on her right side torso (front and back)

There is good news: after about 12 hours of this struggle whatever the obstruction was probably passed the crop. In just a few minutes she went from the same troubled state she's had been in all day to a flurry of activity! She ate, drank, pooped and hopped and flew up to the mini-roost perches I made yesterday (something she has never done even in full health) in VERY short order - and she did multiple rounds of each! Her poops are still small, but have become wetter.

After 15-20 minutes of cavorting she slowed down. Then she started her penguin torso contortions again. At first I though she simply was sore. But later it dawned on me that whatever is a problem in her crop is now a problem in her gizzard.

She's doing much better on the surface at least. She has done several more rounds eating, drinking, pooping, and hopping up to the perch and hopping off. But these are punctuated by period of stillness and the penguin contortions as she tries to get comfortable. So we're better,
but not out of the woods yet. (This state has stabilized since the initial recovery and is largely unchanged four hours later)

So the question is: can we do anything about this? Obviously short of the finest arthroscopic surgery a shaving or needle piece is not going
to be extracted.

But these woody things are made out of stuff like cellulose that doesn't break down in your average digestive system...

Of course we can (and will) keep close tabs on her feeding, watering, and pooping. We will also make use of both the Rooster Booster and Nutri-Drench as needed. It's getting close to their bedtime so we will check back in in the morning.

But what was a problem in the crop could become a problem elsewhere. Currently her only symptom is the penguin wiggle/contortion. The morning will tell if this is better or worse. But until then I want to at least pose the question (in case things don't improve or get worse):

Is there anything ELSE we can do? Can something like this naturally pass in time if we keep her going?

 

[HoopyFrood]

I just realized I never finished this thread! I don't like leaving threads unfinished in case someone finds it in the future and it might provide help. I now realized no one replied and, unfortunately, I cannot offer any further insight. But I will record what happened.

I'm not sure how I screwed up the days in this post (both in the title and in the above text), but I was exhausted at the time. OP was on May 8th, 2016, this was a four-day old chick on her fifth day.

The day after (May 9th), she was five days old on her sixth day. She started out the day with decreased swelling, the flushed color was gone, and she had more energy. She did pretty well that day and was still eating and drinking. However, unbeknownst to me, at one point midday while I was at work she regurgitated a substance that looked like bubbly saliva, but it was super thick and sticky, like liquid rubber cement. She continued to eat and drink, but over the course of the evening the swelling began to increase again.

The next morning (May 10th, six days old, on her 7th day) she awoke VERY lethargic, the swelling was back to where it was on the 8th and the redness had returned. She refused to eat or drink. We tried to feed her directly with a small spoonful of Nutri-Drench. She didn't want to drink that and as she turned in the holder's hands she again regurgitated that sticky, saliva substance. Her breathing was very labored - very slow. About half the rate of the other chicks.

We continued researching as we had been for the past two days and came across stories on BYC of how people had saved a chick's life by draining an air bubble that had built up under the skin by carefully piercing the skin (only the skin!) with a fine hypodermic needle.

We spent the most agonizing 5 or 6 hours in our lives trying to encourage her to eat or drink. She refused. She never pooped. The only time she'd move was to do that penguin wiggle. She was exceedingly uncomfortable.

Knowing a chick that doesn't eat or drink is a chick that will die, and seeing her suffer, we decided to try to drain the bulge. We failed and she died during the procedure.

When she expired she regurgitated 2-3 liquid ounces of that bubbly mucus-y substance. We do not know if it came from her respiratory or digestive system. It was less bubbly than cappuccino froth, but not by a lot. If it was in her respiratory system it would definitely explain her labored breathing. If it was in her digestive system then perhaps the buildup of pressure is what caused the labored breathing? I don't know.

I don't have many good pictures, unfortunately. But here's what I have:

 

[HoopyFrood]

We had the chicks hand delivered from a hatchery, the lady doing the round had many hundreds of baby chicks in her truck and just handed us our chicks, we never got to choose.

It seems that rule of "never buy a lethargic chick" is what went wrong. Our Australorps were always the most subdued chicks of the bunch, but she was the slowest of them.

Yet she was a glorious, happy chick the first three days of her life and loved playing with her sisters. She was a loving girl and full of spirit. We miss her dearly; even more so as her Australop sister, Aurora, is the sweetest, most gentle (and most intelligent and most agile) in the flock. Anytime Aurora makes our hearts sing, we imagine what life would be life had there been two Australorps: Aurora and Katy.

But as sad as the experience was, it is offset by the joy we had in those few, sweet days with Katy.

And here's how we'll always remember Katy